Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium Pitch Report | Hyderabad

Ten men's one-day internationals have been played at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium with complete ball-by-ball records, and the average first-innings score in them is 297. Only Holkar Stadium in Indore, on a smaller sample, has been more productive over fifty overs among the Indian grounds in this dataset, and Uppal's figure is not the product of one freak game: four of those ten first innings landed between 300 and 350, and only three finished below 250. Shubman Gill's 208 off 149 balls against New Zealand in January 2023 and Sachin Tendulkar's 175 off 141 against Australia in November 2009 both happened here, and India lost the second of those matches.

The ground the locals call Uppal opened for international cricket in the mid-2000s and staged its first Test in November 2010, against New Zealand. It is a red-soil square with a large playing area and an unusually true bounce, and its reputation as a flat deck is broadly deserved in white-ball cricket. What that reputation misses is the red-ball record, where spin has taken 117 of the 181 wickets in six Tests, and the Indian Premier League record, where the median first innings across 89 completed innings is 164 — a figure that would not look out of place at a slow ground.

Reconciling those two things is the point of this page. Uppal is a venue where the ceiling is exceptionally high and the floor is ordinary, and the format you are watching determines which one you get.

First-innings averages by format

Figures are computed from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive for the ground, which records the venue under several name variants and is treated here as one. Only completed first innings — all out, or the full quota of overs — are counted in the averages.

Format	Matches in archive	Span	Mean 1st innings	Median	Runs per over	Runs per wicket
Test (men)	6	Nov 2010 – Jan 2024	378	331	3.23	35.5
ODI (men)	10	Nov 2005 – Oct 2023	297	295	5.66	36.0
T20I (men)	3	Dec 2019 – Oct 2024	230	207	10.04	37.9
IPL	90	Apr 2008 – May 2026	169	164	8.16	27.7

The T20 international row should be read with care and is included mainly because leaving it out would hide the ground's most extreme scorecard. Three matches is not a sample; one of them was India's 297 for 6 against Bangladesh in October 2024, which remains India's highest total in the format. A ten-runs-per-over career rate across 747 deliveries tells you the surface can be flayed, not that it usually is.

The fifty-over row is the trustworthy one. Runs per wicket of 36.0 across nearly 6,000 legitimate deliveries is high for an Indian ground, and the dot-ball rate of 47.7 per cent is the lowest of any format here. Fifty-over cricket at Uppal has been a batting exercise.

The Test record: 687 at one end of it, 127 at the other

Innings of the match	Runs	Wickets	Runs per wicket
First	2,269	55	41.3
Second	2,325	60	38.8
Third	1,449	52	27.9
Fourth	595	20	29.8

The first two innings of a Test here have been worth about 40 runs a wicket each — an unusual symmetry, and evidence that the pitch does not deteriorate on day two the way many Indian squares do. The collapse comes in the third innings, where the rate falls to 27.9.

India made 687 for 6 declared against Bangladesh in February 2017, Virat Kohli scoring 204 off 246 balls, and that remains the ground's highest total. Cheteshwar Pujara made 204 off 341 against Australia in March 2013 and 159 against New Zealand the previous August. Brendon McCullum's 225 off 308 in the inaugural Test of November 2010 is the highest score by a visiting batter at the venue.

The two Tests that got away from India are more informative than the run-fests. In January 2024 England won by 28 runs after being 190 behind on first innings: Ollie Pope made 196 off 278 in the second innings and Tom Hartley, on debut, took 7 for 62 from 26.2 overs. In October 2018 West Indies were bowled out for 127 and 194 and still lost by ten wickets, Umesh Yadav taking 6 for 88 and Jason Holder 5 for 56. A ground that can produce 687 and 127 in successive Tests is a ground where preparation matters more than geology.

Pace against spin

Format	Pace wickets	Spin wickets	Spin share of overs	Pace average	Spin average
Test (men)	64	117	59%	44.0	30.6
ODI (men)	102	40	28%	40.5	34.8
T20I (men)	18	14	37%	45.1	29.3
IPL	677	252	30%	29.4	32.1

The IPL row is the one that separates Uppal from most Indian grounds. Spin has averaged 32.1 in the tournament here against pace's 29.4, which is the reverse of the usual Indian pattern and the reverse of what the same calculation shows at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi. Rashid Khan's 28 wickets are the third-highest tally at the ground and he was excellent here, but the aggregate says spin has been contained rather than dominant.

Pace has produced the best returns in the archive: Alzarri Joseph's 6 for 12 from 3.4 overs on IPL debut in April 2019, Ankit Rajpoot's 5 for 14 in April 2018, James Faulkner's 5 for 16 in May 2013 — all against Sunrisers Hyderabad on their own square. Bhuvneshwar Kumar's 48 IPL wickets here are the most by anyone at the ground, and Dale Steyn's 27 came at a time when the venue was scoring far less than it does now.

In the red-ball game the pattern is conventional and stark: a pace bowler has averaged 44.0, a spinner 30.6, and Ravichandran Ashwin alone has taken 33 wickets in six matches, including 6 for 31 and 6 for 54 in the same Test against New Zealand in August 2012. The wider story of that skill in Indian conditions is set out in the guide to India's spin bowling tradition.

The IPL curve, season by season

Sunrisers Hyderabad and their Deccan Chargers predecessors have used the ground as a home base for most of the tournament's history, though not in every season, and the scoring record splits neatly in two.

Season	Matches	Mean 1st innings
2008	7	173
2011	7	161
2012	4	154
2013	8	135
2014	4	166
2015	3	163
2016	7	144
2017	8	164
2018	7	152
2019	8	172
2023	7	174
2024	6	205
2025	6	192
2026	7	209

From 2008 to 2019 the mean never once reached 175 and twice fell below 145. From 2024 onwards it has not dropped below 190. The 2013 average of 135 across eight matches is the lowest single-season figure at any of the ten Indian grounds surveyed in this set for a season of four or more matches; the 2026 average of 209 is among the highest.

Part of that is a squad that decided to bat differently — Sunrisers made 277 for 3 against Mumbai Indians in March 2024 and 286 for 6 against Rajasthan Royals in March 2025, and lost neither — and part of it is a genuinely faster surface with less grass and a harder outfield. The 33 first innings between 120 and 149 in the archive are almost all from the earlier era, and they explain why the ground's median is still only 164 despite three consecutive high-scoring seasons.

Toss, chases and what a target is worth

Format	Chose to bat	Chose to field	Bat-first won	Chasing side won
Test (men)	6	0	3	2
ODI (men)	7	3	6	4
T20I (men)	1	2	1	2
IPL	38	52	40	48

Pakistan's 345 for 4 against Sri Lanka in the 2023 World Cup is the largest total chased down here in any format — Sri Lanka had made 344 for 9, and the match produced 689 runs in a day. At the other end, the lowest total successfully defended in an ODI at the ground is 286, which tells you how rarely a bowling side has protected a modest score.

The IPL numbers are more balanced than the ODI ones but still lean towards the chase: 48 wins from 88 decided matches, with Sunrisers themselves chasing 247 in 18.3 overs against Punjab Kings in April 2025 — the largest successful IPL chase at the venue. The smallest total ever defended here in the tournament is 127, by Pune Warriors in April 2013.

Captains have historically batted first in the longer formats and fielded first in the shortest, which matches the evidence rather than contradicting it. India's fifty-over record at home and the venues that shaped it are covered in the history of ODI cricket in India.

How a T20 innings unfolds

Phase	IPL runs per over	IPL balls per wicket
Overs 1–6	7.91	26.8
Overs 7–15	7.74	25.2
Overs 16–20	9.36	11.9

The middle overs cost almost exactly what the powerplay costs, which is the signature of a surface that neither grips nor deteriorates within an innings. Wickets, though, come far faster at the end — one every 11.9 balls in the last five overs, against one every 25 or 26 earlier. Boundaries account for 16.9 per cent of all IPL deliveries here.

Abhishek Sharma's 141 off 55 balls against Punjab Kings in April 2025 and 135 off 68 against Delhi Capitals in April 2026 are the two highest IPL innings at the ground, both from the top of the order. David Warner, with 1,623 runs, and Shikhar Dhawan, with 1,477, are the leading run-scorers in the archive by a wide margin.

Seasonal and conditional caveats

Hyderabad's international fixtures land in two windows with different characteristics. Tests and late-year ODIs fall between October and February, when evenings cool sharply and the ball can hold up in the surface; the January 2024 Test against England turned appreciably from day three. IPL matches from late March to May are played in dry heat on a hard, quick outfield, which is where the boundary counts come from.

Dew is a genuine factor in the late-evening games but a smaller one than at coastal grounds, because Uppal sits on the Deccan plateau at some altitude above sea level and the humidity is lower than in Chennai, Kochi or Cuttack. Second-innings spin has still been noticeably harder to control in night matches, which is part of why captains field first. The broader relationship between Indian weather and the cricket calendar is covered in the monsoon and the Indian season.

Four things the averages conceal

• The ODI average is a small-sample average of large scores. Ten matches produced a mean of 297, but the ground has staged no men's ODI since October 2023. Treating 297 as a current expectation would be reading a 2023 World Cup group stage as a permanent property of the square.
• The gap between the Test and the IPL surface is the largest in this survey. Spin takes 65 per cent of red-ball wickets and averages 30.6; in the IPL it takes 27 per cent and averages 32.1. The same square, prepared differently, produces opposite bowling economies.
• The venue's lowest IPL total is more recent than its reputation suggests. Delhi Daredevils were bowled out for 80 here in May 2013 and Sunrisers for 96 in April 2019. Both came in seasons where the ground's mean first innings was in the 130s or 170s, not in the modern high-scoring era.
• 687 and 127 are eight years apart on the same ground. India's 687 for 6 against Bangladesh in 2017 and West Indies' 127 in 2018 bracket what a Test pitch here can be asked to do. Curators at Uppal have shown more range than the phrase "flat deck" allows.

The ranked lists of team and individual performances at the venue live on the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium records page. For the ground's place among the country's major venues see the guide to India's iconic cricket stadiums, and for the wider national context start at cricket in India. A useful contrast with a slower, lower-scoring southern IPL surface is the Sawai Mansingh Stadium pitch report.

Sources and method

All scoring, phase, toss and bowler-type figures on this page are computed from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), read as at August 2026. The archive holds six men's Tests from November 2010, ten men's ODIs from November 2005, three men's T20 internationals from December 2019 and 90 IPL matches from April 2008 at this ground. Match counts on this page are counts within that archive rather than a complete fixture history of the venue, and no women's international has yet been recorded here in it.

Averages, medians, distribution bands, innings-by-innings run rates and phase splits are calculated from the deliveries themselves, not quoted from a third party. Wickets are attributed to bowlers only where the dismissal was caught, bowled, lbw, stumped, caught and bowled or hit wicket, so run-outs and retirements are excluded; that is why the pace and spin columns can fall short of a format's total. Classifying bowlers as pace or spin is an editorial judgement applied by name, and the handful of occasional bowlers who could not be classified confidently are omitted from those columns rather than assigned a guess.

Ground details — the November 2010 first Test, the red-soil square, the Uppal location and the stadium's seating, which published sources give variously between roughly 39,000 and 55,000 — come from Hyderabad Cricket Association and ESPNcricinfo ground information and are descriptive rather than computed. No capacity figure is used in any calculation on this page.